My Captivity
Date: October 29, 2014
Excerpt:
In the early morning hours of July 3, one of the two top commanders of Al Qaeda in Syria summoned me from my jail cell. For nearly two years, he had kept me locked in a series of prisons. That night, I was driven from a converted schoolroom outside the eastern city of Deir al-Zour, where I was being held, to an intersection of desert paths five minutes away. When I arrived, the commander got out of his Land Cruiser. Standing in the darkness amid a circle of men draped in Kalashnikovs, he smiled. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.
Back at the Nusra Front’s camp, I spent most of my time lying on a blanket in the sand, surrounded by five fighters. We snacked on M.R.E. junk food, tossed our candy wrappers into the wind and waited for the Man of Learning to issue orders. The fighters hardly paid attention to me. They had been away from home for a week, an eternity for young Syrians, and were anxious to find out what was happening back in Deir al-Zour. They wandered along the ridgeline, searching for a cellphone signal. When they got one, we got news: We learned that the Islamic State assumed control of the city in the days after we abandoned it, staged a handful of Hilux-and-black-flag victory parades and confiscated a car belonging to the father of one of the Nusra Front fighters.
